This week for Free App Friday (#FAF) we’ll look at a pair of free apps we use daily here at Tech Haven that you might not be aware of. Skitch for marking up images and documents, and Tweetdeck for monitoring & managing multiple Twitter accounts.
If you regularly engage in either activity, these apps aren’t to be missed.
Free App Friday (iOS): Skitch
Skitch is my go-to app for annotating screenshots for tutorials, pixelating parts of images for posting on social media, marking up PDFs with edit notes, and even writing notes on a map pulled from Apple’s Maps service.
Created by the developers of Evernote as a companion app, you can upload your Skitches directly to the Evernote notebook of your choice, or share your finished images directly with Facebook, Twitter, text or email – or continue working on the image with any iOS app that you can access via the share sheet.
Here at Tech Haven I use Skitch all the time to annotate screenshots for tutorials, with the built in tools creating arrows, drawing boxes, or pixelating private data in an image, it takes me a few seconds to prepare the image I need. If you do these activities too, and currently labor through them using Photoshop, download Skitch and give it a try.
Free App Friday (Mac): TweetDeck
If you’re a Twitter power user and manage multiple accounts for work, clients, or personal reasons, TweetDeck should greatly streamline your daily Twitter existence. With a customizable multi-pane view of your accounts, hashtags you’re monitoring, @ mentions, Direct Messages and more, you get an instant at a glance awareness of your Twitterverse.
Looking for something even more robust than Tweetdeck, a comprehensive solution that can interface with a multitude of other social media services? Hootsuite can manage virtually any social media account you can think of from Twitter to Facebook to Instagram and beyond.
One of the best things about Tweetdeck is the ability to schedule Tweets. If you’re prepared, you can enter a week’s worth of posts in ten minutes and schedule them to post at your desired times so you don’t need to make daily posts. Depending on your workflow, this capability could be a huge timesaver.
